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June 23, 2004
In the next section of Empire Hardt & Negri address the legacy of modernity that we have inherited. They say:
"The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world. Concentration camps, nuclear weapons, genocidal wars, slavery, apartheid: it is not difficult to enumerate the various scenes of the tragedy."
Fair enough. There is a tragedy associated with western modernity. It Australia, for instance, it is associated with the destruction of the aborigines and the destruction of the environment by irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin. So we need to make sense of this underside of modernity. My own preference is some kind of dialectic of enlightenment that holds onto the positive and negative sides of modernity and explores the interplay between them.
So far so good. We have common ground. Hardt and Negri then go on to say:
"By insisting on the tragic character of modernity, however, we certainly do not mean to follow the "tragic" philosophers of Europe, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger, who turn these real destructions into metaphysical narratives about the negativity of being, as if these actual tragedies were merely an illusion, or rather as if they were our ultimate destiny! "
Once again we have a dismissal. This time it is a dismissal of Heidegger. Dismissal is not an argument nor an engagement.
However, a metaphysical narrative need not be an illusion. It can led to a disclosure of technological mode of being, which treats ecosystems as resources to be manipulated, as Heidegger showed.
Still we have a legacy that we have inherited from modernity to deal with. It is a narrative about the underside or the negative of modernity. This narrative is called the "black armband" view of history by Australian conservatives. They say it is a declinist view of history that highlights all the negatives and none of the positives.
Hardt & Negri go on to say:
"We cannot be satisfied, however, with that political condemnation of modern power that relies on the historia rerum gestarum, the objective history we have inherited. We need to consider also the power of the res gestae, the power of the multitude to make history that continues and is reconfigured today within Empire. It is a question of transforming a necessity imposed on the multitude-a necessity that was to a certain extent solicited by the multitude itself throughout modernity as a line of flight from localized misery and exploitation- into a condition of possibility of liberation, a new possibility on this new terrain of humanity."
The mulitude makes an appearance. Is this a sort of populism in which multitude and Empire stand antagonistically against each another?
In populism the working class is replaced by the "multitude" or the people and so the concept of political "activist" would change. Populism in Australia (eg. Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) has articulated the misery of the regional working poor due to the reforms in favour of free market economics. This populism has been associated with a defence of the nation state against global economic flows. It has also advocated more democracy in liberal parliamentary politics to give the regional working poor a political voice.
In Australia that populist political voice was incorporated by the conservative Howard Government during the mid to late 1990s.
Are Hardt & Negri giving populism an international twist in Empire?
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I, too, am troubled by Hardt and Negri's deprecation of"tragic" philosophers "who turn these real destructions into metaphysical narratives about the negativity of being". In its generic form, it seems to be a rejection of the mediation of history (res gestae, "what actually happened", Geschichte) by historiography - or any form of representation ( historia rerum gestarum, narrative, Geschichten). What sort of unmediated apprehension of this res gestae is possible without recourse to historia rerum gestarum? On the surface, it would appear to be a rejection of theory in favor of a mythos of "pure" unmediated praxis. Are we to take it that the authors are in possession of some sort of red telephone wired directly to the Bureau of Becoming? Or perhaps it is the multitude, by virture of being the multitude, that automatically possesses this connection, if it can only awake to revolutionary consciousness of its control over the means of production of History itself. Are we replacing the "epistemic privilege" of the oppressed dear to subaltern postmodernists with an "ontologic privilege" of the multitude? An ontologic privilige that we can partake of be joining in action with the multitude. Come to think of it, hasn't Marxism (the religion) always had this mystical, "enthusiastic" current?
It is also interesting to note the way that the concept of res gestae has been repurposed and projected onto the forward temporal horizon: that moment of power and potential where the future meets the present, what the French call actuality. Is this related to Hardt and Negri's habit of using "ontological" as an intensifier?Is this not a mystical conflation of concept and persuasion?Which would help make sense of the elided litany of the sins of modernity that separate (and connect) the two quotes above.
In passing, I am troubled also by the way that the value of all activity seems to have been conflated to its utility to the revolutionary agenda. (What will we live for after the revolution?)